Vance wrote this in July 2016 in The Atlantic:
Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos. Not long ago, a teacher who works with at-risk youth in my hometown told me, “We’re expected to be shepherds to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” And those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes.
What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.
The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.
I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.
This was written before Trump got elected, so one might reasonably ask where did the guy who wrote it go since then? Is he himself the kind of wolf that he warns against here? People like Mitch Romney think so, but Romney, though a good man, is not a shrewd one. Vance is, I believe, more than a vulgar opportunist. He understands the spiritual rot that is eating away the Liberal Order, and he’s a man on a holy mission to save the country from itself. I think he’s dead wrong, but I don’t think he should be underestimated.
Since Trump’s election, Vance has been read in by the Radical Right Braintrust. He’s become part of their crusade, and he’s been enlisted into a stable of young, bright, articulate religious conservatives who eventually will be the public face of a movement to back America from the pagan libertines—indeed pagan libertines like Donald Trump.
But unlike Democrats who expect their presidential candidates to be competent, Republicans are satisfied to have a useful fool play the role. They realize they can’t win without him, and if they win with him this time, they won’t give up power next time. They realize Trump is a sociopathic narcissist who will not tolerate anyone who takes attention away from him. That was Steve Bannon’s mistake. You need to be more Mike Pence-like in your willingness to kiss ass. I don’t think Vance is an ass-kisser by nature, but he will do it if it serves the larger mission. It takes a certain kind of religious discipline to self-abase in that way, and his conversion to Catholicism in 2019 perhaps gives him some guidance along those lines.
I don’t know how this is going to play out. No one does, but we can take some educated guesses. LIke most revolutionary movements, which is what we see here on the Radical Right, this one comprises factions, each suspicious of the other but willing to tolerate one another until they obtain power.
Now I’m not sure that a guy like J.D. Vance and other Catholic intellectuals like Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, and more than half the Supreme Court are acceptable to the other factions in the long run. MAGA is driven by ancient Calvinist resentments, after all, and it distrusts intellectuals. And the other curious thing is that these Catholic intellectuals are (mostly) anti-Neoliberal communitarians, and I don’t know how that sits with the Heritage Foundation intellectuals and Business Libertarians. So for now they’re all playing nice with one another, but if MAGA wins in November, that won’t last, and if history gives us any indicators, it’s the faction that is the most ruthlessly thuggish, not the intellectuals, who will win in the end.
But here’s a thought to play with. Who’s the most famous and influential American conservative intellectual of them all? Bill Buckley, of course. And his imagination of social order is very much influenced by his father’s business interests in Mexico, and he was famously pro-Franco and an equally infamous in his defense of the Southern segregationist social order. As I argued in the previous post, the social order of the Old South has more in common with the Iberian authoritarian social order of Franco’s Catholic Spain and Catholic Latin America than with the North Atlantic democracies. The Southerners didn’t like the Catholic part, but that was then when they didn’t understand it. But it all comes together in Buckley’s brand of fusionist American conservatism.
Conservative Catholicism is having something of a moment lately. For instance, what’s going on in recent years with all these conversions—from Newt Gingrich in 2011, Ahmari and Vermeule in 2016, to Vance in 2019, and this year Candace Owens? Then there’s this way that Catholicism is becoming a form of trendy reactionary chic among ontologically dizzy young people. I don’t question their sincerity, but I find it disturbing that It’s a particular imagination of the Church that attracts them, and that has more to do with its Iberian authoritarian traditions and social order than the kind of church that Pope Francis is trying to shape that cares more about the spirit of the gospels than conservative social order.
And perhaps that Iberian, Buckleyite Catholicism can be grafted onto the soul of the Old South in the Age of Whatever. Again, I don’t know. But don’t underestimate the intellectual sophistication and attractiveness of the Catholic intellectuals—especially for smart young people looking for meaning in their lives—and don’t underestimate the thuggishness of MAGA. Can the two, brains and brawn, work together to achieve their holy mission? Maybe, but it’s hard for me to think that this kind of conservative Catholic intellectualism and MAGA evangelicalism can coexist in the long run.
Of course, most of this probably won’t matter if Americans reject MAGA in November. These astonishing rulings by the Supreme Court, I hope, will have a galvanizing effect on shaping the American electorate’s resistance to MAGA extremism. I still think that the Democrats will win. Yes, they are playing a weak hand, but it’s not as weak as the Republicans’. But the Dems always seem to find a way to make a complicated mess of things, so let’s hope they get their act together.